1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention described herein pertain to the field of robots. More particularly, but not by way of limitation, embodiments of the invention enable robotic harvesting of agricultural crops.
2. Description of the Related Art
The use of robots to automate tasks performed by people is increasing. Robots provide several important benefits over human labor including improved efficiency, less expense, more consistent and higher quality work performed, and the ability to perform hazardous work without endangering people. Individually and collectively, these benefits help businesses increase margins and profits, which is essential for maintaining competitiveness.
Agriculture is one industry with traditionally low profit margins and high manual labor costs. In particular, harvesting can be expensive. For some crops, such as tree fruit, harvesting labor represents the growers' single largest expense, up to 50% of total crop cost. Increasing labor costs and shortages threaten the economic viability of many farms. Therefore, replacing manual labor with robots would be extremely beneficial for harvesting.
GPS controlled automated tractors and combines already operate in wheat and other grain fields. Automated harvesters exist that can blindly harvest fruit by causing the fruit to drop from a plant into a collection device. For example, Korvan Industries, Inc. makes equipment than shakes oranges, grapes, raspberries, blueberries, etc. off plants. These harvesting approaches have wide scale applicability, but are not applicable to the harvesting of all crops.
For example, while oranges may be harvested en mass by shaking the tree, this method only works for the fruit that will be processed. Shaking cannot be used for picking oranges sold as fresh, i.e. table fruit. The violent nature of this harvesting technique can bruise the fruit and tear the skin, which is both unappealing to the consumer and causes the fruit to rot quickly.
Thus, whole tree harvesting approaches comprising “shaking,” are inappropriate for picking fresh fruits and vegetables such as apples, pears, tomatoes and cucumbers that are to be sold as whole fruit. A different approach is required, one in which each piece of fruit is picked individually.
People have attempted to develop mechanical pickers to pick whole fruits for years. For example, Pellenc, a French manufacturer, built a prototype orange picker, but abandoned the project. One common failure mode for these picking systems was that they could not locate fruit located on the inside of the tree that cannot be seen from outside the canopy. To date, no equipment exists that can pick fresh fruits and vegetables efficiently enough to compete with human labor in cost or yield.